In normal game, 20 players is enormous amount of players, but longturn practice says that 50% of ppl who declare to play until the death, stops playing after few rounds and became idlers. So we need lot of players to be sure that game will be interesting.

A: Idler is such bad guy, who permanently doesn't connect to game, so game doesn't speeds up. Rememeber, that 24h timeout is '''maximum''' timeout, not fixed. So if everyone will connect before that time '''and''' click end-turn, game will be faster. It's important, especially at very first rounds.

A: Press , select ''idle'' from ''show'' menu, and you will see last a number in last column for each player. It's the number of rounds when given player hasn't connected.

A: you can try to force him to connect frequently to Longturn. If it won't help, and his idle timeout exceeds a big value, he will be deleted from map or replaced by a new player which might be given some cash and settlers. You should take look at the rules.

A: Sure! Everyone says it at start :).

A: nothing bad. It is perfectly normal to miss some turns, every LT player does that. If you miss a turn, every planned activity will go on (cities produce things, taxes are collected, science procedes, workers build roads, etc.). Simply, units that didn't have any order to perform, will stay still, and cities that produced something and did not have a production queue, will build an improvement chosen by AI.

A: no, connect when you want to. That is the good thing of this kind of game.

A: you don't. You have to arrange meetings with him, a good way is to use the mail service in the website e.g. use the LT7 player list and click on a user name. Then you can arrange a time and be connected at the same moment. We recommend Jabber or other IM, to communicate with your neighbours.

A: not a real problem. If you plan to go away and not play for some time, please warn the other people. Once they know why you are missing, they won't delete you, and if they're nice, they won't attack you. Or buy a GPRS modem and a laptop ;)

A: there are two types of game (1) fixed length turns, (2) non-fixed length turns. Type 1 is simpler: every turn lasts exactly 24 hours.

In type 2 instead, game advances to a new turn if all players have made their turn, even if the time limit didn't expire. So, turns may (and may not) be shorter than 24 hours. You have no way to know if turn is advanced, other than to connect, but you always know that you won't miss a turn if you connect just a bit before 24 hours since your last turn are expired.
Example: you do your turn at 11:40. If you connect within 10:35 the next day, you are guaranteed you won't miss a turn. That's mathematics.

A: yes! You can se the forum post about how to improve freeciv longturn.

If you connect exactly when the turn ends, you'll receive lots of useful information you won't receive otherwise. This is a bug. CMA too does not work if you are not connected when turn ends. That's another bug. If you want these bugs solved, please write a patch, or pay somebody to write it. Or pray. A lot.

For what it's worth, here's a bug that covers the information issue: (ednotover, has moved away from FreeCiv a while back - so no one's working on the bug as far as I know).